My real name and pseudonym are, I believe unique. However, this trend to de-masculinize males is getting ridiculous and just further illustrates how insidious the feminist movement has allowed males to be devalued, right down to their names. The misandry in this country is outrageous and it is even more proof of how political correctness has been allowed to flourish without nary a challenge to it. The article exemplifies the attitude to want their male children to be unique, but without the 'stain' of masculinity which will do what to them they think? Make them less bullied, make them appear more effeminate with their 'unique' non-masculine name, what? I have several friends name John and I view them all as unique. This sentiment is stupid and I'd like to punch it's author in the face for being so stupid.

Frankly, I wish my parents would have named me Mace, Gladius, Hammer, Stone, or some such overtly masculine name. My name is masculine, but still, those names are cool as fuck.

Will demasculanized names help boys get into college at the same rate as girls?

“Naming your kid Hunter or Breaker is like saying f--k you to the world that invented feminism,”There was, no shit, a baby born in town a few years ago named Beau Hunter Buckmaster. That's maybe a little too much testosterone-infused to live up to.

Having seen the article when Insta highlighted it, I think there's more smoke than fire here. Many of the names are virile Old Testament ones - Jacob (the Duke in The Comancheros), Ethan (the Duke in The Searchers), Joshua (Steve McQueen in Wanted Dead Or Alive), Jasper, or Noah (Webster) - much in use in the 19th Century (Emmett was the first name of Howie Long's character in Broken Arrow).

Kason, Jayden, or Jax have a certain Orlando Bloom, metrosexual feel to them , but I think the issue seems to be a lot of Anglo-saxon standbys - William or Robert have fallen from fashion.

Max is Maximilian which is very Teutonic masculine. They are believing their own propaganda here and trying to get some vague credit for what? The most popular name James is a favorite name from the New Testament. It made 2 disciples names and 1 head of the Jerusalem Church who got his own epistle in the scripture and was called Jesus's brother.

“Naming your kid Hunter or Breaker is like saying f--k you to the world that invented feminism,” said Richmond. “It’s a desperate cry to hold onto an archaic and useless form of masculinity, whereas naming your kid Robert III after your grandfather who invented the flyswatter and bought the house in Newport is a very different kind of holding onto an outmoded form of masculinity.”

What if your grandfather, who invented the flyswatter and bought the house in Newport, was named Hunter?

Utter tommyrot! When are we women going to accept the idea that men are not women with balls? Christina Hoff Somers is right: masculinity is hard-wired. This totally asinine effort to change that which is biologically hard-wired is going to leave us with a lot of messed up boys. Jeez! Let men be men, fer cryin' out loud! Civilize them using the time-tested and proven methods of civilizing males—no! dolls don't cut it! Just civilize the boys, teach them about honor and genuine masculinity and leave them the hell alone!

Freakonomics claimed that there is little cause-and-effect relationship between a name and success in life. I still laugh when I think of their report of a parent who named the kid what was pronounced "shah-TEED" but spelled "shithead."

I love all the above comments. It is pretty dumb to think you can mold your kid by its name. From what I am told, the young always win that battle. As the contributors clearly show...gender and force in a name is locked in culture/time. Boy today is girl tomorrow...Tiffany will give way to Breaker or Crunch. Maxfield is an interesting name... Maxfield Parrish, a very collectible and brilliant technical artist/illustrator of the early 20th c. He knew,invented and rocked his color chemistry...do google him- if only for his name. Shel Silverstein wrote A Boy Named Sue and Johnny Cash sang it. "I tell you, life ain't easy for a boy named Sue." Where can you go from there with names? The poem and song are awesome.

“Among my generation of parents, our nontraditional boys’ names—vaguely androgynous, nonmacho, or just plain unique—reflect our own desire to raise sons who will be as comfortable pushing dolls in strollers as pushing trucks,” said Deborah Siegel, Ph.D.

My first son's name is extremely unique. You will not find it within the top one thousand names.

But we didn't name him that in hopes that he'd love to push a stroller around.

My son picked his daughter's name of Callan which in Welsh means a cunning warrior. He said she would need to fight in this life since she was born with a Tuberous Sclerosis condition. It is working. And Callan looks and acts as a baby exactly like my son did as a baby.

I was born in 1962. There were plenty of boys named William, Michael, David, and John. People are still choosing those names for their boys, even as others choose Brandon, Joshua, or Evan.

But the popular girl names from when I was a kid? They've dropped off the map. It seemed that half the girls in my elementary school were named Karen, Nancy, or Susan. Those three names don't appear in this list of the 100 top girl names of 2010.

Peter -- Jennifer is gone, too. That was every third girl when I was a kid.

That's probably the funniest thing about the article. Left unsaid is the fleeting and ever-changing nature of female naming conventions.

I always wanted to name my daughter Mary -- the old standby -- or Doris, after my favorite aunt and a perfectly fleeting name that was once popular and is now remarkably out of favor. But I got no daughters, only masculine boys.

Really, it's not the names, but the parent's attitudes that grate. They're determined to raise girls no matter what they've got. They're brainwashed and silly.

I've got a friend whose step-son has one of these "new" names and he's now a target - can barely go to school because the other kids have smelled his weakness. His mom's a total lib (and totally unreasonable) without a clue how to manage what's happening to her son. I told them to teach him to fight and tell him to - and force him to go to school - but all that did was get them made at me, the token conservative in their lives. They'd rather have him be the campus weirdo, treated like Marty McFly.

“Among my generation of parents, our nontraditional boys’ names—vaguely androgynous, nonmacho, or just plain unique—reflect our own desire to raise sons who will be as comfortable pushing dolls in strollers as pushing trucks,” said Deborah Siegel, Ph.D., author of Sisterhood, Interrupted and founding partner of SheWrites, whose 1-year-old son is named Teo. “But what I wonder is this: Will a boy by a different name really be that much more sweet?"

I can't believe the article doesn't mention that three of the ten fastest rising names come from the Twilight books (Jasper, Emmett and Cullen).

Somehow I doubt most moms (and it is definitely moms) who name their kids Emmett are doing so in search of a "non-gendered ideal." Yes, they're feminized vampires, but they're still vampires.

I find naming trends so interesting, but think that Laura Wattenberg (http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog)does a much better job theorizing about what names mean than the author of this article does. Plus, Wattenberg has created a cool tool (the NameVoyager) that charts name popularity over time.

Kit Pollard, I made that same observation on the comment thread over there yesterday. Struck me immediately upon seeing the list. Then again, I have an adolescent daughter, so I'm in the demographic that would recognize such a thing. It totally cracked me up.

And if you didn't know, Jayden is what Britney Spears named one of her sons. Celebrities wield enormous influence on baby-naming, especially when babies of very young mothers.

ET1492 said...Max was a compromise. I wanted Maximilian, like the evil red robot in The Black Hole. But my wife convinced me to go with Max, like "Mad Max."

Reminds me of the fight over our 3rd daughter: I wanted Jemmima but the wife wouldn't budge, so we settled on Jemma. We were well aware that the traditional spelling of Jemma is Gemma, but the G way seems too likely to be mispronounced.

We had Calvin picked-out as a son's name, but never had a boy. We toyed with Kelvin, which we though was both cool and hot at the same time, but he would probably be called Calvin all the time anyway.

Look far enoguh back in history and many of these allegedly amasculine gentle names were carried by rapists and pillagers. Seems that this story is more a tale about the ahistorical quality of the perpetual American revolution, and less a story on how things are changing.

As the biys grow up the hostorical baggage of these names will be dug up again.

While waiting to testify against a juvenile miscreant in court the other day, I heard the mother of another young defendant waiting for his time on the dock to arrive complain to her friend that the prosecutor who called his name kept pronouncing it "Kelvin" when it was really "KelVON".

KelVON seemed to be a frequent flyer at juvi court, so maybe she thought they'd quit making that mistake. She didn't seem as concerned that he was in court again, as much as that when they pronounce him guilty, they should pronounce it correctly.

Had we had any boys, at least one of them (perhaps both!) would have been named Titus Andrew. My wife wasn't exactly thrilled, but since the other option was August Wilhelm (or Wilhelm August) she relented.

However, both were girls and both given properly feminine, non-trendy names.

Coached a co-ed kids' soccer team over the summer. One kid was named Jayden. It took half of the season for me to figure out Jayden's gender. He had the whole deal: long hair, lefty mom who wouldn't even let the poor kid cross the street (at an age where that should certainly be possible), and who would come running at the first sign of the slightest hint at discomfort. The kid may well turn out just fine, but he's not likely to be "the man's man" without some intervention. Probably should have played football.

When we were looking at names, we went with family names, so the popular name list was not considered.

I like family names best too. My brother is named after my grandmothers (or is it great grandmothers?) maiden name and I have a cousin who is named after his mothers maiden name. (sadly, my maiden name would not work in this capacity).

This article is stupid, though. No mention of all the naming girls guy names? That seems to happen a lot more than the reverse.

A Boy Named Sue was written by Shel Silverstein but legend has it the inspiration for the song came from Jean Shepherd (paging rh) who spent a boozy night relating to Silverstein how defending himself from the fists of bullies for having a sissy name toughened him up.

Back in the 50's we listened to a children's record of Carl Sandburg reading one of his stories entitled The Five Marvelous Pretzels, about 5 Pretzels in a bakery window who imagined themselves joining a circus. Sandburg had a deep sonorous voice and would roll the consonants and draw out the vowels whenever he'd announce the Fiiiive Maaahhhhrrvellllous Pretzels.

"And just before they run out of their dressingrooms in pink tights and bow to the audience andthrow kisses to the audience, one kisswith the right hand and the otherkiss with the left hand, a manwith a big musical megaphonecalls to the audience“THE FIVE MARVELOUS PRETZELS!”Then up in the air they go and twoof them hang by their kneesand throw the otherthree pretzels backand forth in theair, in theempty andcircumambientair."

William and DDh's Five More Feminine Names made me laugh out loud and wonder how fine they would have sounded with Carl reading them off as the names of the Five Marvelous Pretzel Sisters!

I was wondering what the fashion for naming girls with boy's names plus the letter a was caused by. I went to school with girls named Roberta, Keitha, Davida,Jonna. They all seemed to come from the genertion from right before WW II. Haven't seen it since.

"*Actually the term Old Testament is offensive but I don't think most of the readers would have understood the reference had I said traditional Hebrew name."

Lisa, don't be offended. Here's what the term acknowledges: there is no New Testament without the Old Testament because the New stands firmly on the Old. To understand the New, one must read the Old to which the New constantly points.